Perhaps it is St Paul’s fault; many things seem to be. But in this case it is his superlative rhetorical power that has led readers astray, rather than the logic of his argument. The ‘problem’ lies in the great peroration on love and leaving childish ways, that ends with ‘So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love’ (1 Corinthians 13.13; RSV). Yes, love is the greatest, but the flow of the rhetoric encourages us to underestimate faith and hope, especially as we live in the shadow of the 1960s assertion that all you need is love. If recent history (national and global) is any guide, we need more love for our fellow humans, but to live well together, love is not all we need.
Faith doesn’t receive much attention in Ghassan Hage’s provocative new book, Against Paranoid Nationalism. What he has to say about hope is, however, fascinating, and is a powerful comment on the strange and distressing mental state we as a community are in. The starting point is crucial:The most important thesis developed in this work is that societies are mechanisms for the distribution of hope, and that the kind of affective attachment (worrying or caring) that a society creates among its
citizens is intimately connected to its capacity to distribute hope.
Society is not merely about the distribution of goods and services, ‘equitably’ or ‘productively’, depending on the brand of economics you subscribe to. It is about the circulation of hope, about individuals’ need to be able to place their lives in an optimistic or at least consoling narrative.
That is what is so bitter about living in the present compared to the postwar boom years. In material terms, nearly all Australians live better than they would have in the 1950s; we have even reached the historically bizarre point where obesity is a fairly reliable marker of poverty rather than wealth. Economic growth has delivered an unprecedented, if uneven, distribution of goods in Western countries, and yet we are ungratefully grumpy, to the bewilderment of economically liberal politicians and commentators. Hage suggests that, with the efficiencies, the productivity, the flexibility, and the global flows of capital, goods, and labour, have come anxiety and paranoia.
This makes a lot of sense to me. Most of the organisations I deal with, and especially the university where I work, are gloomy not because their members are, objectively, doing